Let's be real for a minute. What you're actually saying is these hobbyists don't really matter and they don't even deserve to name their projects. Only Real Projects created by Real Programmers at Real Big Tech corporations get the cool names.
This is the kind of disrespect that pushed people to create trademark laws.
The actual issue here is you acting like a name collision is a huge problem. It isn't, it's an everyday occurrence on Github alone. We just add a bit more info, like the account name in the case of Github or the year of release for movies/series/games etc.
If a name really isn’t such a big deal, then it shouldn’t be a big deal to change it to something else that wasn’t already taken. If there’s resistance to that idea, then maybe names are a big deal after all.
For a language dev, the name of the language is all you really own about it. These days, developers expect their languages and tools to be free, and of course open source and permissively licensed. The name and logo of the language is really the only IP most PL devs actually fully control, and costs actual money and time to maintain (registering and defending trademarks, domains, etc.)
To just step on names like Google has repeatedly done shows a crass disregard for what independent language devs go through.
We are talking about "rune", a common English noun. It's not like Google called it Zig or Jai. And how many github repos are just called "Lisp"?
Google isn't exactly innovative with their naming: Fuchsia, Dart, Pixel, Go, Drive, Ara, ... Aside from rare short-term experiments like Stadia everything outside a basic dictionary should be safe.
I'm not going to defend Google, but this specific case isn't one that I'd lose my mind over.
name collision becomes a problem when at least one of the entities is willing to bring lawyers to bear. not saying that's happening here, but certainly more of a concern in a situation where you have a hobbyist going up against a big company.
Hobbyists do deserve to name their projects. And other people can name their projects the same thing. Not a big deal.
(By the way, the reverse scenario here should be okay, too. If Google makes a project with with a common noun name, then others should be able to use that noun to name their projects.)
If Google can just stomp on anyone's name and that's fine by you, then what does it mean to say that hobbyists "deserve" to name their projects? What you're really saying is that whoever has the loudest voice backed by the most money gets claim over the name, regardless of who had claim to it first. In that world, hobbyists get whatever is leftover by by big corps, and don't really "deserve" anything.
> What you're really saying is that whoever has the loudest voice backed by the most money gets claim over the name, regardless of who had claim to it first.
No, I’m saying that nobody has “claim over the name”. Naming collisions happen all the time, and I don’t know why we get so bent out of shape about it. There are two multibillion-dollar software companies called Epic. There are a million businesses called AAA. I’ve been to three different breakfast restaurants called Sunrise.
Yes, actually, or at least until abandoned by the original authors. That's pretty much the norm in the PL community. There are enough names out there that no one needs to step on any toes. Although I guess Google engineers don't care much about community norms.
But in the spirit of being real: what are you trying to do by calling the Rune devs "a couple of hobbyists"? Is that an attempt to minimize them, as if they are not a corporation therefore they don't have any naming rights to their projects? "A couple hobbyists" are how many great language you know and love started out. Their rights are important too. We don't want the norm to be big corporations snuffing out hobbyist projects by making them unsearchable, like Google did to Go!. That's bad for everyone.
As some other comments have pointed out, this seems to be a one-person project. FWIW, Go also started as a project by 3 people who happened to be working for Google (Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson), so it wasn't Google consciously choosing the name.
Perhaps Google as an employer shouldn't allow employees to choose any name they like, and do some diligence to avoid name clashes. This may sound quite reasonable for outsiders, but internally this will be another step that requires manual review in the process of publishing open source code, and employees will see this as red tape and get discouraged from open sourcing their code in the first place.
The benefit of requiring every project to go through a name clash review is also questionable: there are 2.5k repos under https://github.com/google, and most of the them will never become popular enough for name clashes to be a problem anyway. This repo only has 177 stars despite hitting HN homepage.
IMO Google should instead make it easy for people to publish their open source code wherever they like, but I suppose there are some messy legal reasons why they prefer employees to put their repos under https://github.com/google. (It's not a hard requirement, but they do make you jump through extra hoops to open source your code elsewhere.)
(I'm a Google employee, but I didn't know this project and don't work for the department responsible for the process of open sourcing code.)
It shouldn’t need to be a company policy, you’d think a competent engineer would simply do due diligence in naming their project. I remember searching for name clashes for a project I wrote solo when I was ~13 years old in the early 2000s.
The competence is assumed. The disappointment comes from people who are competent not doing the due diligence that some think should be par for the course when naming a project.
You seem to be a lot more saddened than I am that a nice two letter name wasn't successfully squatted for all eternity by a no longer maintained ultra obscure niche language that no one has ever heard of let alone used.
Now perl stealing prolog's file extension on the other hand...
Given how poor their search engine performs as of late, it's no surprise they can't seem to be original; they obviously can't find anything that already exists.
Rune (the existing language) is a fairly small hobby project that only got started in 2020. The developer of this new Rune probably just didn't know about it.
There is nothing nefarious here. There is no cabal. These things happen all the time. I've had it happen to two of my own small/obscure projects. It happens.
Who is the rightful owner of a name or similarly, a piece of land, or an idea, patent?
The first settler?
The first settler that held it for at least a year, 10 or 100?
The most powerful entity claiming it?
In the modern western mind there is the notion that whoever grabs it first rightfully owns it. Which is a simple rule, but encourages squatting and holding but not using. The squatter can then hold ransom against somebody who would be the rightful owner.
At least with patents or electromagnetic spectrum there is a time of expiration. You come first and claim it for a few years after which it becomes public domain. Or we hold an auction each 5 years to maintain stable and efficient allocation of a finite and scarce resource.
With concepts like programming languages, the case with stronger base wins, like in the example of Go. People associate the Go label with Pike's Golang, not with the previous Go!.
A programming language is such a common personal project, it’s inevitable to not see this happen. It also doesn’t help that 95% of these languages aren’t known.
They should be more careful picking the name.